What We Need More Of, Is Science

No Heroes or Villains
Dodds has a nickname for us humans: Homo narrativus. Dodds, a professor at the University of Vermont, uses mathematics to study social networks. He has argued that people see the stories of heroes and villains, where there are really just networks and graphs. It’s our desire for narrative, he says, that makes us believe that something like fame is the result of merit or destiny and not a network model quirk. (From http://nautil.us/issue/47/Consciousness/to-fix-the-climate-tell-better-stories)

Scientific narratives, if they’re done right, are some of the most powerful of all. They teach us more than facts, mechanisms, and procedures. They convey a worldview of skeptical empiricism and indefinite revision, show us how to negotiate the boundary between our rational and emotional selves, teach us to suspend judgment and consider all the possibilities, and remind us that a belief in objective truth is a deep kind of optimism with massive dividends.

Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, puts it this way: “If you look at how the media treats scientific discoveries, they’ll go to the wonder. ... [They’ll say] ‘here’s this thing that’s been discovered,’ not the process of how we figured it out. And I think that understanding of how we know what we know is so critical ... If you don’t help people understand what those processes are, [if] you just say ‘here’s the answer,’ now they can go onto the web and dial up an alternate answer. I think we’re seeing an erosion of credibility of science to the public because of this huge flood of technology and information.”

This erosion is essential to understanding the modern climate debate. In the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.”4 In the absence of social justification, the public ends up being called on to be the judge of accuracy of representation—in other words, of scientific content